"Portnoy's Complaint" Quotes

There's nothing funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh anymore.

All I am is another white dick for a Negro to suck! The long last creature to be made the victim of American Positioning!

Let's face it. I'm a magic man, Fred. I feel like a magician and I can do anything I want.

But in spite of being morons, most librarians are married, sad to say.

For I am lonely and not learned enough to enjoy the palliatives of solitude.

She didn't insist that I take responsibility for anything, because I was a child, and because responsibility was not useful to me yet; my parents did everything for me — for my brother, too, until the day he died — and all I had to do was breathe and swallow, sleep and grow, plead for toys and chocolate, which appeared like clockwork on appropriate occasions.

How do you make them respect you? By making them cry! Helloo-hey! By having the balls to kick the livin’ shit out of them, that's how!

In the twenty minutes it took the eggs to hard-boil, my mother washed every pot, pan, fork, knife, spoon, and drinking glass in the kitchen.

Behind every flower, there's a dirty piece of soil, Morty. Behind every good marriage, there's a taste for cunnilingus!

One day, I decided not to stay. I wasn't going anywhere, mind you. I just wouldn't stay.